


For the Fallen

by Anais (phoebesmum)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-23
Updated: 2011-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 00:11:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/Anais
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which we remember the war, and the time of its beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Fallen

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published in _Saga of a Star World #3_ (The Thirteenth Tribe), April 1985.

The grass grows green now on the field of Armageddon, and scarlet and white the grainflowers bloom. There's a silence there, a stillness: listening, waiting, as though the whole field were alive. But life is far removed from that place. No children play there, no lovers keep tryst, and in the trees of the forest that borders it no birds sing. In that still expectancy wait only the shadows of the fallen: the forsaken and lonely spectres of those who fought at Armageddon, fought and died more than a millennium ago; fought and lost a battle whose name has passed into our language as a synonym for war.

A thousand yahren ago Caprica was a world at peace, at peace with itself and with its neighbours. Life was good then, rich and fulfilling, although we shunned the twin temptations of luxury and indolence which could only lead to decadence and our eventual fall. Caprican art of that time is seen now as having been at one of its highest peaks; it was a fruitful time, too, for literature and poetry, and the writings of that era are still widely read, even today. Nor were the sciences neglected, for we had almost reattained the heights from which we had fallen after the flight from Kobol, when our Tribes returned for so long to the darkness of ignorance. It was a time of adventure and exploration also. Space flight we had had for – oh, for more than a centura – but starflight! Starflight was new to us, a thrilling, stimulating challenge. Who knew what might lie out there beyond our own skies, beyond our own stars? Who knew what worlds, what lands, what strange alien races? The consciousness of our people was alive with dreams of other shores and other skies, of the light of a thousand different suns; and with dreams, too – dreams of friendship, of learning from and sharing with those other, brother races (for we held, in those days, that all life, no matter what its form, was one) who dwelt in the lands beyond the stars.

Those other races. Our sense of wonder was our undoing. Peaceful for so long, we had neglected to take into account that other races might not be so. For nearly a centura more we continued in our exploration, and many and mighty were the ships that we built to take us to those other stars. And then we heard a cry for help from the race known to us as the Hasari. Humanoid, the Hasari were, enough like us truly to be our brothers, a lost splinter of one of the Tribes of Kobol and, like us also, peaceful, and our twelve worlds and their one were for many yahren almost as one race. Then, without warning, without provocation, the world of the Hasari was attacked – by whom, at that time, we had no idea, but we knew that we could not let our fellows, our friends, fight alone. The Council of Caprica convened and, after them, the Council of the Twelve. The Military Academy, for so long used as a centre for scientific study only, was returned immediately to its original purpose, and intensive training programmes were instituted. Almost the doors had to be barred against the stream of young men eager to enlist. Eager! We had no understanding then of war, of its horror. To us the prospect of conflict seemed but another challenge, another new, thrilling adventure, a chance to win lasting greatness. How could we have known? Ships of war were commissioned, while merchant vessels and cruisers were hastily converted and adapted to a martial purpose. Battle lines were drawn up, ultimatums issued. And that other race responded.

They landed at Armageddon, those flat silver ships so strange to our eyes. We had little warning, for their technology was, at that time, far superior to our own and they were able easily to block our tracking mechanisms. Not until they came within visual range were we aware of their approach, their numbers, their objective, and by then it was almost too late. But word was brought to the Military Council barely in time (the tale of the bringing of that word is almost as famed as that of the battle of Armageddon itself, but now is not the time for its telling), and our warriors were dispatched in convoy after convoy to the field of battle.

Our young men swarmed on to that field, eager to win glory for themselves and for their homeland, only to find themselves outnumbered by more than ten to one and faced by a merciless, ruthless, seemingly invulnerable foe whose weaponry made our own seem primitive, who cut through our warriors' defences as though they did not exist, who advanced slowly but relentlessly, unstoppable, apparently unkillable. We had encountered nothing like them ever before; we could not guess their major strengths, their weaknesses – if, indeed, they had any such, for it seemed to our young men, watching in horror as the piles of human dead grew, that they had none. In those first confused, clamorous microns, hundreds of warriors fell, slaughtered without thought or compassion. Our Commanders ordered retreat. Our forces regrouped, repositioned, advanced again, to fall again, and again, and again. And still the enemy came inexorably onward, destroying all that lay in their path. In the end it was only our human initiative, our independent thinking, that saved any of us. An unexpected or an illogical move would confuse the enemy for a few microns – long enough for one of our warriors to have a chance at a clear shot at close range. By this late time we had realised that this race of machines had one weakness which we could exploit: a single shot through the red scanner in the head would knock out the primary circuits and kill the creature, if such a being can be said to possess life at all. And so, at last, the machines began to fall: a few at first, then more, and then still more, until at last not one was still standing and we were, once more, for a time at least, safe. But no-one called the battle a victory. The field that once had rippled gold with grain ran now red with our warriors' blood, with blood red as the grainflowers that lay trampled underfoot. At such a cost there could be no victory. In that one day almost a quarter of Caprica's young men had been cut down; an entire generation had been lost to us.

So many dead, so many missing – empty, cold statistics. But to parents and to children, to sisters and to lovers and to wives down all the long ages, each of those bare statistics is a beloved face that will never be seen again; a smile, the touch of a hand gone forever. A life's light extinguished.

And so we were plunged into a shattering, all-encompassing war, for the Cylons as we learned to name them, returned all too soon and in greater and greater numbers. A war that was not, is not, of our choosing, neither in its beginning nor in its end, if end to it all, save by death, there ever will be. For a thousand yahren now it has continued, and may well continue for a thousand more, for we cannot surrender, and they will not. But still we remember Armageddon, every yahren, on its anniversary, we gather there to honour our dead. We braid into wreathes the grainflowers that grow once more in the field over the graves of those who fell, and each of our warriors wears pinned upon his tunic one of those flowers, the flowers that legend has it sprang anew from our young men's blood. The High Commander reads aloud from the Book of the Word for the fallen, for those made immortal in their dying, and for a little time we remember. We remember those who shall never grow old; we remember those whose names will yet be added to that roster. We remember, and still we mourn, and we pray that one day we may say "it shall never be so again".

Lords of Kobol, let it never be so again.

***


End file.
